It is now recognized
that one of the fallouts of the Saidian conceptualization of ‘Orientalism’ has
been a decline in the study of Oriental languages and literatures in Western
universities. This is not surprising. Why would young men and women spend seven,
eight, nine crucial years of their lives acquiring skills in a foreign language,
if it earns them the stigma of being collaborators in an imperialist project?
The decline of Arabic in American universities has apparently been particularly
noticeable. One could guess the situation when the Iraq war began
and media coverage indicated that American soldiers were going to the
battlefield without interpreters who could interpret for them. In one incident
American soldiers at a checkpoint fired on a vehicle with women and children
because none of them knew how to shout ‘Stop!’ in Arabic.

Fortunately for us,
the world, though supposedly shrunk into a global village, still has pockets and
reservoirs that resist hegemonic conceptualizations. The life and work of the
young Hungarian scholar Dr Imre Bangha constitute a shining example of such
resistance. I remember vividly my first meeting with him in Santiniketan in the
90s. The image I retain is that of a young man full of curiosity, generosity of
spirit, and human warmth, who expected to be accepted as a friend straight away,
no more, no less. I am happy to put it on record that we have never fallen out,
and let me from now on refer to him as Imre – I shall feel much more comfortable
if I call him that.

Imre was born in
Győr,
Hungary, and
obtained his MA in Indology and Hungarian from EötvösLorándUniversity, Budapest. He subsequently
gained a doctorate in Hindi from
Visva-BharatiUniversity and has since
then been a Lecturer in Hindi on a part-time basis at the Faculty of Oriental
Studies, University
of Oxford. For some time
now he has been dividing his time between
Oxford
and Miercurea in northern
Romania, where he has an attachment at the
Sapientia–Hungarian University of Transylvania. His knowledge of languages is
mind-boggling. Unlike most other foreign scholars who write on Indian subjects,
he wrote his doctoral dissertation at Visva-Bharati in Hindi itself: Ānandghan ke kabittő me upamāmūlak alamkārő kī yojnā (Simile-based
figures of speech in Anandghan’s quatrains). In addition to Modern Standard
Hindi, he knows the Braj dialect and has a basic knowledge of the Rajasthani and
Avadhi dialects as well. Not only does he have a formidable list of publications
in Hungarian, Hindi, and English, but he also has skills in Sanskrit, Bengali,
Urdu, Gujarati, Italian, French, and Spanish, and in addition some basic
knowledge of German, Latin, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, and
Telugu! In other words, in the Saidian scheme of things, he is poised to take
over the world, yet as far as I
know, his extraordinary gift in languages is not in the service of any secret
Central European plot to dominate either the Orient or the world at large.

Hungry Tiger
is a book for which some of us have been waiting for a long time. It was held up
in the press because of the inability of the printers to insert the right
diacritical marks in Hungarian names and terms; I am so very glad that I was
able to intervene and end the deadlock, and Sahitya Akademi allowed Imre to
insert the marks himself. Because of the book’s prolonged gestation it has the
distinction of having three titles: one on the cover, a slightly different one
on the title-page, and surprisingly, yet another one on the reverse of the
title-page. The one I have used at the head of this article is the one on the
cover, which reflects the author’s final decision. Regrettably, Sahitya Akademi
did not execute the change on the title-page, and as for the third variant on
the reverse of the title-page, I have no idea how the publisher managed that!
But anyway I am happy that the book is finally out, even if it has three
identities.

“I started to write
this book,” says Imre, “while a student in Budapest and my original motivation was a
fascination for literary interaction between two impossibly distant cultures. I
hope something of this original fascination can be retained when surveying the
richness and diversity of representation. In many cases the facts can speak for
themselves better than any theory about them.” Fascination is indeed the
key word, and fortunately it does triumph in this book: the wealth of material
garnered, with all its inherent complexities and inevitable contradictions, not
only speaks more eloquently than any theory ever could, but also tells us that
perhaps in the end no two cultures can ever be “impossibly distant”. This
humanistic vision is for me a special strength of this book.

The paradoxes of the
encounter are chalked by the author in his first chapter, ‘Literary Contacts
through the Ages’, and these have been picked up by Dr Martin Kämpchen who has
written a Foreword. I was a little puzzled when I read the opening words in the
Foreword: “Bengal and Hungary – what
could possibly be the connection between Bengal’s
culture and the culture of this small and seemingly insignificant European
country? Where is Hungary
anyway? Even if an educated Indian were asked these questions during a quiz,
many of them would probably produce a blank.” Martin – as he is a friend of both
Imre and myself, I hope I am allowed to call him by his first name too – then
goes on to make up a list of possible connections between the two regions that a
well-informed Indian intellectual might be aware of. Actually, I would have
thought the list was pretty good, indicating a high level of awareness! Two
other countries of the world, picked up at random, might not generate an equally
interesting list! I then found the origin of what Martin is saying in the
following words of Imre in his first chapter:

“Bengal
and Hungary
are two places between which until recently there has been virtually no direct
economic or political contact. Many people in one place do not even know where
the other is. Whenever I am in Calcutta
or elsewhere in Bengal people are keen on
asking me where I am from. The name of Hungary – besides being understood
as ‘hungry’ – does not ring a bell for most of those who question me. If it
does, then it is football .... In turn, for many Hungarians, the name of Bengal represents nothing more than the
Bengal
tiger.”

Well, another German
friend (a noted literary translator named Dr Joachim Utz) once told me that even
in his country, famous for its Oriental scholarship, to ordinary folk Bengal
meant, first and foremost, the Royal Bengal Tiger; so Hungarians needn’t blush
because of the lack of information in members of their ‘Lumpenproletariat’. I
once met a young Hungarian woman, roughly of Imre’s generation, who had never
heard of Mahatma Gandhi. For me that indicated a serious hiatus in her school
education and general knowledge. The young lady’s mother, who was of my
generation, was visibly embarrassed by her daughter’s ignorance and immediately
tried to tell her daughter in a hushed voice that Mahatma Gandhi was indeed an
important man of the twentieth century. I feel similarly embarrassed by those
Bengalis who have never heard of Hungary and
confuse the name with the word ‘hungry’! Since then I have had some e-mail
conversation with Imre about these points, which throws further light on the
complexities of human perception.

Could Hungary be
called a “small and seemingly insignificant European country?” In his first
chapter Imre calls it “a small country: its area ... more or less equivalent to
that of the state of West Bengal”.So it is small in size compared to other sovereign nations in
Europe, but just as West Bengal is significant enough to some of us, so must Hungary be to
Hungarians. Looking at the map of Europe, we
find other countries which are smaller, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or
Slovenia,
each region significant to its inhabitants. Imre points out to me that I have
travelled and know a lot about the geography of Europe,
whereas in India
most of the educated people he meets do not seem to know much about Hungary and come
up with the joke about “hungry”; to them he is just “an angrez”. I feel even
more embarrassed when I learn this, because more than anything this suggests an
identification by skin-colour. Are all white people simply “angrez” to some
Indians? Shall I take some paltry, parochial consolation in the fact that those
who regard him as “an angrez” cannot be Bengali-speakers?

But it is not that I
know of Hungary
because I have travelled in Europe and thus
know about its geography! My truth (and pride!) is that I have been aware of
Hungary since my childhood in Bengal – first because I was born in the war years
and my mother used to explain that distant war to me with the help of a map of
Europe spread on the dining-table, on which I used to lean with great
wonderment, and secondly because geography was an important subject at my school
and was very well taught. Indeed, in my school years I had even heard of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire which had existed once but didn’t in my time. So perhaps
I just happened to have attended a school that was academically excellent? But I
also knew, since my childhood, of the half-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil and
the Hungarian woman named Eta Ghose who had married a Bengali, and these bits of
information were obtained not through school but through totally different
artistic and literary networks.

Above all, I was
aware of Hungary
because of the Tagore nexus. I had stared long enough at the hand-written
title-page of Lekhan, signed “Srirabindranaththakur/ Budapest/ 26 Kartik/ 1333”, and his prefatory
words to that collection, dated “Nov. 7. 1926/ Balatonfüred, Hungary”. Long
before I read Rani Mahalanobis’s account of her travels in Hungary with
Tagore, I was aware of Tagore having planted a tree there, by
Lake Balaton, and thus of the Hungarian connection as part of my
Tagorean heritage. The other point I have been aware of at least since my
twenties is that Hungarian names of persons and places were important in the
mental map of a major Bengali lexicographer working before the Second World War,
and I am delighted to find that Imre also refers to him in his first chapter:
none other than Jnanendramohan Das, whose dictionary is indispensable to those
of us who write in Bengali. As Imre correctly infers, the large number of
Hungarian names listed in Das’s Appendix of foreign names, with guidelines on
pronunciation, indicates the importance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in Europe before the First World War.

Alexander Csoma de Kőrös's tomb
and inscription on the tombstone

Since my student days
the other, more personal factors in my awareness of Hungary were first, my love
of gipsy music, of which I knew Hungary was one of the notable homes, and
secondly, my study of philology at college, through which I knew that Hungarian
was not a member of the Indo-European family of languages, but of the mysterious
Finno-Ugric family. Later, when doing my doctoral researches, I heard about that
intrepid Hungarian traveller and scholar, Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, who lies
buried in the outskirts of Darjeeling. Later still, when working on
Tagore and Victoria Ocampo, I found out about the Hungarian artists, mother and
daughter, Elizabeth Sass-Brunner and Elizabeth Brunner, who came to visit Tagore
in Santiniketan. And finally I take pride in being the first Bengali to read the
English translation of that Hungarian best-seller, Rózsa Hajnóczy’s The Fire
of Bengal, when it was still in typescript form! The Hungarians cited above
and many more colourful personalities enrich Imre’s survey of the
Hungarian-Bengali contacts in the past two centuries.

This question of how
much the general public of one country happens to know about another has set me
thinking deeply about this whole business of the acquisition of mutual
knowledge. Let me set some of these thoughts down here, as I think they are
quite contextual. So much depends, really, on the educational philosophies of
different countries. I consider myself lucky that my schooling happened in the
years immediately after India’s
independence, when, by way of a post-imperial legacy, an enormous emphasis was
put on ‘knowing the world’. The thinking went somewhat like this: every little
mole or vole knows his little hole, but as we are human, we have to know the
whole world, its far horizons and oceans, and the distant stars. In my school
the serious study of ‘the world’ began in high school geography. With an
exemplary dedication our Malayali Christian geography teacher started us off
with South America, the continent she imagined to be the
furthest from us physically and mentally. To her the goal of education was
precisely the mastery of terras incognitas. Exposure to such thinking in
one’s formative years shapes one for a lifetime. There was no way that I
could come away from Miss Varkey’s lessons not knowing where Hungary was!
Ever since those days I have known that the capital of Hungary is made
up of two cities, Buda and Pest, with the
mighty Danube flowing between them. Indeed, the
Danube became my favourite European river, and I used to love
tracing its magnificent curves in map-drawing classes. In the end, live
connections between different countries or cultures are made by a special set of
people, who can act as messengers, intermediaries or bridge-builders. Born in
Hungary
and writing his doctoral thesis in Hindi, Imre himself is clearly one such
person. Martin Kämpchen, the German scholar with a base in Santiniketan, is
another such person. Likewise, though I have never actually set my foot on
Hungarian soil, I love Hungarian music, Hungarian goulash with lots of paprika,
and the poetry of Miklós Radnóty when I can get hold of it in translation. So
perhaps I am also one of those people specially interested in making and
understanding human connections, which is why Hungry Tiger is just the
kind of book which speaks to me and delights me.

I therefore agree
with Imre when he says: “Many theoreticians interpret the exploration of the
world in its diversity as a struggle for power. For me it was enough to see my
nine-month old son’s delight in exploring every nook of any room or kitchen to
be reminded how limited this approach was.” Wisely, he tries to avoid seeing
literary productions and receptions in terms of just power-struggles. Not that
he is unaware of the fact that the material he has assembled can indeed be read
“in the light of the post-colonial theories”, yet he reminds us that Hungary was not
one of the colonizing, maritime powers of Europe.
“On the contrary, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it almost
functioned as a Hapsburg colony.” Hungarian readers would therefore often feel
greater sympathy for the Indian struggle for freedom from colonial rule than
with the colonial rulers. The search for Hungarian roots in the East lent extra
strength to that sympathy. It was only about 1100 years ago that the Magyar
people settled in the territory that has become known as Hungary. They
did integrate into Christian Europe, but nevertheless “they have always been
conscious of their eastern roots”.

There are indeed some
interesting parallels between the Bengalis and the Hungarians in the way their
histories have unfolded, and Imre himself as well as Martin in his Foreword
foreground them. Both the linguistic-literary traditions are about a thousand
years old. I confess that I was puzzled when I read the following sentence in
the Foreword: “Their respective literatures share a thousand-year-old history
with their origins in classical languages: Sanskrit and Pali with respect to Bengal, Latin with respect to Hungary.” This seemed to contradict
the origin of Hungarian in the Finno-Ugric family. But I realize what has
happened. Martin is referring to a sentence of Imre’s in the first chapter:
“Both Bengali and Hungarian languages look back to a history of about a thousand
years, at the beginning of which classical languages were literary languages:
Sanskrit, Pali etc. for the Hindu and Buddhist Bengalis and Latin for the
Christian Hungarians.” It is not that the Hungarian language originates in
Latin, but that when Hungarians began to develop literature in their mother
tongue, Latin was the literary language of Christian Europe, including the
Hungarians. The shorthand style of reference in the Foreword has resulted in a
sentence that might be misinterpreted, and this perhaps needs to be rectified in
the second edition of the book. Imre has explained to me by e-mail that the
relationship of Hungarian to Latin is rather like that of Telugu and Sanskrit. A
vernacular can absorb learning from a cosmopolitan language of a different
family and in the process absorb some of its essential vocabulary.

Perhaps another
shorthand reference has occurred in the Foreword in the following sentence: “...
both peoples were under foreign rule and broke lo[o]se only in the twentieth
century.” I presume the reference is to Hungary’s relationship with Austria, but I
feel that the question of ‘foreign’ rule is a matter of definition. The Magyars
themselves arrived ‘from outside’. Some Bengalis might feel that Delhi rule,
whether Mughal, British, or modern-Indian, is foreign rule, just as some
Scottish people feel that ‘London rule is foreign rule’, or just as the British
resent EEC diktats issuing from Brussels. Being under any kind of imperial rule
or within some sort of federal consortium the centre of which is a few hundred
miles away can be felt as constricting ‘foreign rule’, which is why
post-imperial states so often explode into fragments. I have discussed this
point with Imre and he agrees with me, saying that the distinction between
‘foreign’ and ‘national’ is usually the creation of modern nationalism, and
pointing out how Bangladeshis would now consider
Delhi
to be a ‘foreign’ ruler. Those of us who were children in the forties and had
grown up playing with children of diverse communities received, in 1947, the
perplexing message that Hindu and Muslim Bengalis could no longer live together
in friendship within one nation. I haven’t forgotten the jolt – how
incomprehensible the message seemed to me at that time.
East Pakistan
regarded West Pakistan first as a co-sharer
within one new nation and then as an oppressive ‘foreign ruler’. All cosy
feelings of compact, tribal nationhood as well as disturbing perceptions of the
‘foreignness’ of ‘others’ are in the end constructs.

Imre explains in his
book that from the end of the seventeenth century Hungary was part of the Hapsburg
Empire in a subordinate position. In the mid-nineteenth century there was an
unsuccessful war of independence, followed by years of “passive resistance”,
when the Hungarians drew inspiration from the Indian Mutiny. In 1867 Hungary reached
the same status as Austria
within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, Hungary became a
sovereign state, but only at the expense of a partition that caused it to lose
more than two-thirds of its historic territory to its old and new neighbouring
states. The partition, and the consequent creation of two streams of literary
writings (in this case within Hungary and outside Hungary) are
indeed striking parallels between the fates of Hungarians and Bengalis. Another
parallel between West Bengal and Hungary is the
experience of communist rule, albeit within different frameworks. And communism
has played a most interesting role in Hungary’s perception of Tagore, with
his reputation rising and falling in accordance with shifts in political
thinking.

In his wide-ranging
assemblage of material Imre demonstrates that “it is sometimes interest in the
different and sometimes interest in the similar” that motivated
the Hungarian-Bengali interactions. This history is often one of
misunderstandings, yet it helps us to understand the other side as well as our
own.

It was Rabindranath
Tagore – who else? – who was the first person to write in Bengali about
Hungarian literature. I still remember the excitement with which Imre told me
that I simply had to read Tagore’s 1894 article ‘Sahityer Gaurab’, published in
the magazine Sadhana. The article had been included in the first edition
of the book Sahitya, but I could not locate it in my
Rabindra-rachanabali edition. It wasn’t there; it had been dropped. Never
mind, Imre sent me the necessary pages, photocopied. In this article, touching
the popular Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, two of whose novels Tagore had read in
English translation, we can see that Tagore’s “interest was attracted by
Hungarian nationalism in its full bloom”. He admired the way nationalist
sentiments had helped to consolidate Hungarian literature, and regretted the
lack of that consolidation in his own territory. In view of his rejection of the
competitive and politically aggressive nationalisms of an Europe of a later
date, this early admiration of Hungarian national feeling leading to a
celebration of literature is indeed striking, showing how his thinking has never
been static, but has continuously evolved under the pressure of diverse
experiences. Hungary was a
non-colonizing nation that had recently emerged from its subordinate status, so
in 1894 it was possible for Tagore to sympathize with its nationalist feelings,
which taught Hungarians to be proud of their writers, such as Mór Jókai. Tagore
wished that Bengalis could learn from the Hungarian example and be proud of a
writer like Bankimchandra.

Hungry Tiger
is a well constructed book, Imre’s own survey being laid out into six major
chapters, the title of each clearly indicating its scope. The first chapter, to
which I have already referred several times, is entitled ‘Literary Contacts
through the Ages’, and the remaining five are: ‘Hungarian Travellers in Bengal’,
‘Tagore’s Reception in Hungary’, ‘Tagore’s Poetry in Hungarian’, ‘The Visit of a
Poet-Prophet in Hungary’, and ‘Tagore’s memory in Balatonfüred’. The scholarship
throughout is detailed and impressive, and the style of presentation is
attractive, without the clutter of jargon, which makes reading the book a
pleasurable experience, drawing the reader right into the heart of the
narratives. Imre, I know, is continuing to gather more relevant material, which
will hopefully go into a second edition of the book one day.

I have particularly
enjoyed learning more about the Tibetologist Csoma de Kőrös, who has been one of
my heroes ever since I did my doctoral researches in the early seventies. Later
in the twentieth century efforts had apparently been made to see Csoma in a
negative Saidian framework, as someone whose scholarship was in the service of
British interests in Tibet.
I am delighted to see that Imre exonerates Csoma from that charge: “Csoma can be
considered as one of the most notable examples to contradict Saidian
essentialism.” True, without the British presence in India and some of their
intiatives, requests, and assistance, Csoma’s scholarship might not have borne
fruit, but Csoma, “who was a Székler from Transylvania, an ethnic group that in
his times claimed continuity with the Huns of the fifth century”, was fired
first and foremost by “a universal human curiosity in exploring the unknown” and
secondly by the patriotic idea of finding the roots of his own people in Asia,
which is “nationalism in its most positive sense”. He fulfilled his promise to
the British and found out all he could about Tibetan, writing the first grammar
of the Tibetan language in English, and compiling the first Tibetan-English
dictionary, works which are landmarks in nineteenth-century Oriental
scholarship, but when he found that Tibetan was not related to Hungarian, he
learnt Sanskrit and some Indian vernaculars including Bengali in the same
quest. When he didn’t find the necessary links there either, “he set off for Lhasa and Chinese Turkestan to investigate the
possibility of a Uigur-Hungarian relationship”. This restlessness shows a
lively, inquistive mind rather than any political motivation. Talking of
Uyghurs, once having heard Uyghur performers from Chinese Turkestan sing and
dance in Oxford,
I was so captivated, and so utterly intrigued by the resemblances between what I
heard and northern Indian music that I was driven to write a poem about that
experience! We know of Tagore’s poem ‘Sagarika’ and his thrill in discovering
the traces of ancient Indian influence in the cultures of
South-East Asia. So I sympathize, and agree entirely with Imre when
he movingly says: “He [Csoma] was not working to present the Oriental people as
the ‘others’, but was searching for relatives.” Searching for relatives –
that’s precisely, and paradoxially, what we are often trying to do when we are
ostensibly surveying ‘others’: we are not trying to distance ourselves from
those ‘others’, but actually trying to come closer to them! Csoma was indeed
searching for the ethnic origins of his people through a study of Oriental
languages, but a search for relatives can be metaphorical rather than
genealogical. We do search for people with whom we can be friends, with whom we
can sense some spiritual affinity, or to put it in a modern idiom, with whom we
are on the same wave-length. When Imre came to talk to me in the Rabindra Bhavan
in Santiniketan with a big beaming smile, expecting to be accepted instantly as
a friend, he was doing something similar. I am thrilled to know from this book
that Csoma continues to be held in high esteem by Bengali scholars, that
Hirendra Nath Mukherjee, while still a student at Presidency College, wrote a
short biography of Csoma which was published in the Presidency College
Magazine in 1926, which was later expanded into a full-length book, and that
another Bengali, Durga Charan Chatterji, composed a quatrain in Sanskrit in
praise of Csoma’s scholarship.

The coverage in this
book of the other Hungarians who visited Bengal, including Ervin Baktay (the
maternal uncle of Amrita Sher-Gil), Julius Germanus, the Professor of Islamic
Studies at Visva-Bharati, Germanus’s wife Rózsa Hajnóczy who supposedly authored
The Fire of Bengal, perhaps with some help from her husband, the two
artistic Brunners (mother and daughter), and Eta Ghose who was married to the
poet Kanti Ghose, should be of interest to Bengalis. The stories are told with
all their complexities and ambivalences. For instance, in 1929 Baktay felt the
Santiniketan campus to be “alien and artificial”, and found a disappointing
discrepancy between the experience of reading Tagore’s literary works and his
manner of holding himself aloof in real life: he “seemed to be posing coldly in
direct personal communication as if he was always aware of his every gesture,
every word. I have felt the poet, in whose works I have found so much beauty and
value, to be alien.” One sees here some of the inherent pitfalls of
cross-cultural transactions, especially if one of the parties has become a
celebrity. The celebrity is afraid of being ridiculed or misunderstood or
imposed upon, so is afraid of opening up, and becomes defensive. This is then
interpreted as ‘posing’.

Germanus’s responses
were extremely complicated. He was disappointed with Santiniketan and in some
ways Santiniketan was not very satisfied with him either. In later years, he
developed an idealized and nostalgic view of the place, which was probably
motivated by Hungary’s
changing politics. As Imre explains: “...in the early fifties – the years of
Hungarian Stalinism – Tagore was discarded as an idealist whose world-view did
not help to strengthen the official ideology of materialism. From 1956 on,
however, he was considered to be a representative of the writers of the
colonised Third World who fought against
imperialism. In consequence he had to be praised.” As for Mrs Germanus’s The
Fire of Bengal, based to a large extent on the couple’s life in Santiniketan
and travels in India, with some fictional elements, I did give Imre quite a bit
of feedback when he was writing this book, and I agree with his overall
assessment that genre-wise it can be compared to the Romanian Mircea Eliade’s
Maitreyi, which will no doubt be familiar to some who are reading this
review. It should be pointed out that both Germanus and his wife display quite a
bit of Europocentric arrogance even though Hungary was not a colonizing power.

I hope what I have
said so far will whet the appetite of readers for the chapters that relate very
directly to Tagore. These are exemplary in their overview of material available
in a plurality of languages and in the mastery of detail. The account of
Tagore’s 1926 visit to
Hungary, moving effortlessly between Hungarian
and Bengali sources, is quite a tour de force in its sweep and colourful
qualities, and in its warmth, human understanding, and compassion. Imre
emphasizes that Tagore and his travelling companion Mrs Mahalanobis felt very
much at home in Hungary, more there than almost
anywhere else in Europe. I shall just refer to
two points that struck me in this Tagore-related section. The first is from the
chapter ‘Tagore’s Reception in
Hungary’ and gives us an insight into the
necessary psychological complexity of responses to ‘foreign’ artists:

“In the 1920s,
Tagore’s ideas received responses from authors who were born or lived in regions
lost after the World War. The reason for this is not simply that apart from
Budapest
the centres of Hungarian literary life fell outside the new boundaries. Even
from among the Budapest-based writers it was the ones whose hometown[s] had been
‘lost’ that[who?] wrote about Tagore. They had an additional motivation to
perceive the irrationality of western thought that led to a war and then to a
peace that they considered unjust. Their disillusionment urged them to examine
whether Rabindranath would offer an alternative to western thinking.”

I believe this kind
of reaction may have parallels elsewhere – in Slovenia perhaps?

The other point is
from the chapter ‘The Visit of a Poet-Prophet in Hungary’. The two essential aspects
of this encounter have been rightly highlighted. One is Tagore’s own “deep
desire to experience expressions of humanity in different people all around the
world”. Yes, Tagore too believed in ‘knowing the world’; he was, as we know,
thirsty for the far horizon. The other aspect is the way the Hungarians
reciprocated, how they in their turn tried to reach out to him in a very human
way:

“Among the
inconveniences of celebrity and the innumerable cases of misunderstanding there
were also some spontaneous moving events during the journey. It is enough to
remember the children of Professor Korányi or the villagers singing at the
window of the poet. In many instances meeting Tagore brought out the best in
those who saw him and the dividing line between East and West was dissolved on
the ground of common humanity as in the case of the Gipsy group leader Béla
Radics’s [gipsy violinist] visit to the sick poet ...”

This analysis has a
strong resonance for me, reminding me of the many similar moments of
cross-cultural human sympathy I found recorded in the journals and memoirs of
the British in India
in the 90-year period before the Mutiny, which was the area of my own doctoral
researches. And there are of course many such moments in Tagore’s own memories
of his international travels, from his very first visit to England in 1878
to his visit to Persia
in 1932. There are clear parallels with Tagore’s experiences in Argentina only
two years prior to his Hungarian sojourn. There too, as in Hungary, he was
ill, but he still wanted to meet people and talk to them. The Hungarian gipsy
violinist Béla Radics standing by Tagore’s bedroom door and playing to soothe
and heal him, but not entering the room, as described by Rani Mahalanobis,
reminds me of the Castro quartet that played Debussy, Ravel and Borodin for
Tagore in Miralrío: the musicians were in the hall on the ground floor, while
the poet, not feeling well, remained in his bedroom at the top of the stairs,
with the door ajar. And that cannot but remind us of that misadventure in England
recalled in Jibansmriti, hilarious and lugubrious at the same time, when
the teenaged Tagore, after an evening of travail, had the very next morning to
sing a lamentation in the raga Behag, penned in English by an Indian, in
front of the closed door of a sick lady.

The six chapters
written by Imre himself are followed by some Appendices. Appendix A presents
carefully chosen and suitably introduced documentary material that greatly
enhances the value of the coverage in the main survey, while Appendix B provides
a list of newspaper articles relating to Tagore in the Hungarian Press. Appendix
A, ranging from Tagore’s 1894 article on Hungarian literature, so generous in
spirit, to Georg Lukács’s notorious 1922 review of Ghare-Baire, in which
he foolishly dismissed the novel as “a petty bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest
kind”, is a real winner. Anybody who wishes to gain an insight into how ideology
can enslave the intellect should read the Lukács piece. My own favourites in
this section are the short story ‘The Tree that Set Forth’, the poem ‘Towards
the Eastern Sunrise’, and the engrossing extracts from Elizabeth Brunner’s
unpublished autobiogaphy. I was also moved to read, in Baktay’s account of his
visit to Tagore, of Tagore’s tree-house “on the edge of the Surul campus”,
accessible only with the help of a ladder and complete with a tiny bathroom.
That is where Tagore used to retire when he wanted real solitude. Seeing it,
Baktay was suddenly “overcome by deep compassion for the Poet”. Tagore had
created “a small new world around him”, but sometimes that creation of his
became a burden to him, and he had to escape from it. There are some very
genuine insights, too, in the article on Tagore by István Sőtér.

In conclusion, I
would recommend this book to all who wish to understand the delights as well as
hazards of cross-cultural meetings.
ReadingHungry Tiger and remembering other narratives of such meetings have made
me think a lot about these issues, so let me indicate in brief where those
thoughts have led me.

First, the purely
literary aspect of such a meeting depends, of course, very much on whether the
two sides can read each other’s texts, and failing direct access, on the
availability of reliable translations, but it also depends on the cultural mood
of those receiving the new input. If the latter think that they are going to
receive something that will expand their intellectual and artistic horizons
while enriching and nourishing their own identities at the same time,
they will sometimes go out of their way to dig for the new riches and discover
meaning in them. Even re-translations will be meaningful for them then. It was
along such a route that the publications of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the
Asiatick Researches, took Europe by
storm at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
expanding the horizons of European scholars, making them re-think their notions
of the Orient, and modernizing their outlook. A similar process took place in
the explosion we call the Bengal Renaissance. Sometimes a search for roots,
sometimes a sense of loss or of impoverishment, or a gnawing dissatisfaction
with ways of thinking that are felt to be outmoded will trigger a quest and
sharpen receptivity. But if the literati of a country have an entrenched
superiority complex which convinces them that they have nothing to learn from
others, even high-quality material that is available will not persuade them to
cast a serious glance at it.

Secondly, besides the
interactions of elites, there are also important moments when the ordinary
people of a country are touched and moved by a foreign phenomenon, and the value
of such connective moments for human societies should not be underestimated
either, because they emphasize our common humanity and bring people of different
countries together. The same triggers as enumerated above can activate a
spiritual thirst amongst ordinary men and women, and cause them to seek
comforting and uplifting messages from a teacher from abroad, as happened in
post-war Germany
and Hungary.
Any such quest that increases the bonds of friendship between different peoples
needs to be cherished rather than diminished in our problem-ridden world. The
West has a double game that it loves to play, first seeking ‘gurus’ from the
East, then running them down for preaching to the rest of the world. Tagore has
often been a victim of this double game.

Thirdly, the media
play a shady role in this double game, first helping to make someone an
international celebrity, and then mocking him and pulling him apart..

Fourthly, though some
Orient-related scholarship of Western scholars may have been co-opted into
‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ projects, not all can be described in such clear-cut
terms. Some scholars throughout the ages have been disinterested seekers of
knowledge. In other cases, terms such as ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ have to be
expanded or re-defined for the Saidian paradigm to deliver any meaning. The
arrogance of a Germanus was very Europocentric, but not in the service of any
empire. With or without empires, there can be a superiority complex that is
based on a group’s sense of achievement, material, intellectual, or spiritual.
Religious establishments and aspiring political ideologies can ooze as much
arrogance as actual empires. Lukács’s dreadful misunderstanding of Tagore was in
the service of communist ideology: perhaps we could say that it was in the
service of a communist imperial project, but Lukács himself would not have
viewed it as such. There can even be consolidations of power within the learned
communities which are hegemonic in nature: many a time have I marvelled at the
hegemonic attitudes of the so-called ‘post-colonial’ critics right across the
world, who by a term such as ‘Indian (or South Asian) literature’ understand
only what is written in English, devoting much energy and finances in elevating,
magnifying, disseminating authors in that category, while completely bypassing
those who write in the native languages of the region, rendering them – to
borrow a term from the Argentina of the days of military dictatorship –
desaparecidos, or ‘disappeared ones’. They seem to have a project of their
own too: is this also not a form of realpolitik, and are we allowed to call it a
‘neo-colonial’ academic enterprise?

I hope that the task
of translating Tagore into Hungarian directly from the Bengali will begin in the
not too distant future. Imre will surely agree with Martin’s point in the
Foreword that only after sufficient numbers of direct translations have come out
can there be a true re-evaluation of Tagore’s works in
Europe. Imre has himself translated a few poems of Tagore into
Hungarian, and I am sure could translate some more, perhaps in collaboration
with a Hungarian poet to advise on the final form and another Bengali who is not
just a ‘native speaker’ but understands the language of poetry. As the person
who knows both the languages in question, he would be the linchpin of such a
team. After attending an international poetry translation workshop in Slovenia in 2007, I am convinced
that intelligently and sensitively used, such a strategy can work. Using similar
methods, reasonable translations of Tagore’s prose could be undertaken too. And
I don’t mean that only Tagore needs to be translated; there is a plethora of
good writers out there, waiting to be translated. And it goes without saying
that Bengalis should translate from the Hungarian too. A few poems and short
stories have indeed been done, as Imre informs us in his first chapter, using
one or more intermediate languages. I recollect translating one poem of Mihály
Babits in collaboration with Imre. At the end of the day we have to face the
fact that unless there is some collaborative effort, the literatures of most
languages will remain untranslated. And unless there are reliable translations,
there will be no end of misunderstandings.

I only wish Sahitya
Akademi had taken a little more loving care of such a scholarly piece of work.
In spite of the book spending a long time at the printer’s, a few misprints
remain: not many, just a few, but enough to be disconcerting in a learned book.
The book could have also done with some copy-editing to regularize punctuation
and eliminate the occasional slips or infelicities of the kind that a polyglot
scholar is apt to make when writing in his second or third language. It is 99%
there, and publishers in
India, where everybody is now so proud of the
standards and achievements of ‘Indian English’, owe it to such scholars who have
made India their field, to assist them
with the remaining 1%. What good is the prestige of English in India if those
who handle it so confidently cannot offer a modicum of editorial assistance to a
scholar who has made it his business to study Indian languages and is at the
same time capable of delivering a book in English for the international
community, which is 99% there? Is this also a double game being played by the
Indian learned classes? Many who write in English in India cannot write in any other
language but that; here is a ‘foreign’ scholar who can write about India in three
languages. Surely he deserves some assistance from those who are English-savvy.

Let me give here one
instance of the kind of slip that can arise directly from a constant attention
to a plurality of languages. On p. 234 I read, about a book, that “it was
revised in several periodicals in October and November 1926”, where the author
clearly means reviewed, not revised. The root-meaning of both
words is roughly the same, referring to seeing or looking at something again,
but the active meanings have diverged. When speaking to me in Bengali, Imre
sometimes does something analogous: he uses a word in its Hindi sense, that is
to say, the word is common to both Hindi and Bengali, but the meanings have
slightly diverged, and Imre uses it in its Hindi nuance, because he is immersed
in teaching and studying that language. This is indeed a small matter, but I
feel that as Sahitya Akademi is a major academic publisher in India, a little
intelligent copy-editing to support the work of foreign scholars for whom
English is not a natural mother tongue and who are engaged in putting Indian
languages and literatures on the map of the world would be entirely appropriate.

By the way, “Prof.
Shibaji Bhattacharja at JadavpurUniversity” who is thanked
in the Acknowledgements is surely the well-known academic Prof. Shibaji
Bandyopadhyay, and I hope he is not feeling too much abhimaan at this
metamorphosis of his surname. If a joke about caste is permitted, I would like
to point out that even in this slip his caste status has been respected! Again,
this is just the kind of slip someone at the publisher’s end could have picked
up and weeded out.

But my principal
regret is that Sahitya Akademi has not included a single photograph! In his
Acknowledgements, the author thanks “the Rabindra Bhavan in Santiniketan for the
copyright of several photographs”, but where are the photographs? This
book, which is so richly documented in the textual sense, is crying out for some
visual material, which would have made it a little more reader-friendly. Books
like this are always enhanced by a few photographs. Readers remember the
visual images and connect them with the text, with the story being told.
Printing a few photographs is surely no big deal in this day and age. Technology
has made such advances, and India is
supposed to be teeming with competent, advanced printers. If it is a question of
money, I am sure potential customers of this book would happily pay a few more
rupees to have a book which was a little more visually eloquent. Indeed, putting
in a few photographs is a good investment for a publisher, as it widens a book’s
market. I sincerely hope that this book will soon be given a second printing,
with the minor errors corrected, the title identical on the cover, the
title-page, and the ISBN page, and all the photographs restored.

As I finish this
review, I am happy to say that Imre has developed one of his chapters, with some
additional material, into an article for Parabaas, and has also provided
some photographs to accompany the feature.